Post by Rob W. Case on Aug 11, 2009 0:12:31 GMT -6
Editor's Note: If you would prefer to watch my presentation on this subject via YouTube, then please feel freek to click on the links below....
Bible Prophecy--The Importance of Knowing Bible Prophecy Pt.1
www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTckTgSlEvw&feature=channel
Bible Prophecy--The Importance of Knowing Bible Prophecy Pt.2
www.youtube.com/watch?v=EONJFXQnDoE
Bible Prophecy--The Importance of Knowing Bible Prophecy Pt.3
www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkWMdWn9h-o
Otherwise, please enjoy the following presentation in written article form. Thank you.
A Little Information About the Bible:
Some dismiss the Bible as “just a book,” or write it off as some “control mechanism” to dictate their lives. Those views are unstable in scope and dimension, misleading, and dangerous. To a Christian, the Bible is much more. The Bible is a living and breathing entity. When you accept Christ as your savior, and you read the scriptures, the Holy Spirit serves as a “decoder” of some of the more “complicated” elements within the Bible. The Bible serves many functions.
1. The Bible serves as a source of human history and God’s role in it.
2. The Bible serves as a source for wisdom in living and enduring at the present time.
3. The Bible serves as a comfort for those who put its wisdom into action.
4. The Bible chronicles the nature of the human heart and where it will lead with or without him.
5. The Bible reveals what we perceive at this moment as future events, as God revealed to the prophets in the past, the details and events that will lead humanity to a specific, prophetic conclusion.
All that I stated in describing the Bible serves as critical components relating to prophecy, as I will describe for you in a little while. But first, I want to share with you some of the functions of Bible prophecy, and how it relates to human history and where it will lead us in its advancement. Prophecy is a fascinating, compelling, and ever-so interesting field of study. It is history written in advance. When you get into it, and I mean really into it, you can see God’s will for the world and see his plan unfold in it. Understanding Bible Prophecy serves these functions.
1. It proves the validity of the promises of God.
2. It reminds us that God is in control.
3. It serves as an instrument for measuring the moral and immoral state of humanity.
4. It serves as a tool to prepare us for the Lord’s return, so that we will be ready both spiritually and morally when we meet him face to face.
5. We will reach a point when we all know that all we did after receiving Christ as our savior, telling others, and bringing up the hope that was in us was worth it.
I am going to go into detail here a little bit.
1. It proves the validity of the promises of God.
When God makes a promise, he does not take light of it.
As Moses experienced firsthand in Numbers 23:19
19 God is not a man, that he should lie,
nor a son of man, that he should change his mind.
Does he speak and then not act?
Does he promise and not fulfill?
Adding to that, Hebrews 6:13-19a declares the certainty of God’s promise.
13When God made his promise to Abraham, since there was no one greater for him to swear by, he swore by himself, 14saying, "I will surely bless you and give you many descendants." (First given in Genesis 22:17) 15And so after waiting patiently, Abraham received what was promised.
16Men swear by someone greater than themselves, and the oath confirms what is said and puts an end to all argument. 17Because God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose very clear to the heirs of what was promised, he confirmed it with an oath. 18God did this so that, by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope offered to us may be greatly encouraged. 19We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure…..
The Promises God makes are yet just another proof that God exists. If his promises are coming to pass against all odds, and are firm and secure enough to where humanity cannot derail them, then there is an uncommon, supernatural weight behind the one who promises such things, whether visible or invisible. In other words, if humankind cannot prevent a promise of God from taking place, then who is he to say that there is no God altogether? They are stumped and stopped by someone who they claim does not exist.
Throughout the Old Testament, God made a series of promises. He promised the world a King that would rule justly, heal their land, remove their tears and sicknesses, and look out for them. In that, he sent His son, Jesus Christ.
How Satan Influenced Mankind to Try and Prevent prophecy from Taking Place:
King Herod was a Jew who knew prophetic scripture. Paranoid against losing his power as King, the Jews were waiting for the arrival of their Messiah to come in their lifetimes. King Herod found out that the Messiah would arrive as a child, so he ordered that all of the children under the age of 2 be destroyed. Jesus, as a baby was not destroyed. His family fled to Egypt where Jesus was secured and kept safe.
God promised that when Israel came back into Jewish Hands, the nation would never again be destroyed.
Amos 9:14-15 declares….
14 I will bring back my exiled people Israel;
they will rebuild the ruined cities and live in them.
They will plant vineyards and drink their wine;
they will make gardens and eat their fruit.
15 I will plant Israel in their own land,
never again to be uprooted
from the land I have given them,"
says the LORD your God.
The Jews lost their sovereignty over Jerusalem in 586 B.C. to the hands of the Babylonians. Since then, for 2,534 years Israel was not a nation. Not only was it not a nation, but wherever nation the Jews went, they were either in exile, expelled, or destroyed altogether.
How did Satan Influence mankind in trying to prevent prophecy from taking place in this matter?
Jews were the targets of many persecutions for centuries. It was not until May of 1948, just 3 short years after the holocaust, Jews all over the globe began supernaturally returning to Israel, and they established a state, fulfilling the prophecy I just stated from Amos chapter 9. The Bible mentions that in the last days, Israel would be a burdensome stone (Zechariah12:3-KJV) -meaning that it will be an inconvenience, an annoyance, and that people will rather it fall off the face of the earth than deal with it, but those who try to remove it will end up hurting themselves in the process. Many nations on earth today want Israel destroyed. They believe that it is in the way of establishing world peace and global government. Irregardless of the powerful threats against it, the nation of Israel will be protected supernaturally by God. At this moment, the momentum is coming together that makes the fulfillment of Ezekiel chapters 38 and 39, which chronicles the invasion of Israel by nations like Russia to come into fulfillment. But regardless of this fact, God will prevail, as he states that in the process of this invasion….
Ezekiel 28:21-23
22 I will execute judgment upon him with plague and bloodshed; I will pour down torrents of rain, hailstones and burning sulfur on him and on his troops and on the many nations with him. 23 And so I will show my greatness and my holiness, and I will make myself known in the sight of many nations. Then they will know that I am the LORD.'
The nation of Israel’s existence within this very age was birthed by a promise, and protected by a promise. As long as the nation of Israel exists, God once again proves to the world that he exists, and that His will, will prevail.
Another promise in the Bible that man could not derail is the promise of the entrance of Jesus Christ at the Eastern Gate in Jerusalem at His Second Coming.
Ezekiel 43:1, 2, & 4
1 Then the man brought me to the gate facing east, 2 and I saw the glory of the God of Israel coming from the east. His voice was like the roar of rushing waters, and the land was radiant with his glory. 4 The glory of the LORD entered the temple through the gate facing east.
This promise was delivered to the prophet Ezekiel in 574 B.C. just 12 years after the Babylonians invaded Jerusalem. Jesus went through that gate in 33 A.D. on Palm Sunday as people shouted, “"Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!" "Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!" (Luke 19:38) The Jews rejected Jesus as their Messiah, but there was more written that pertained to the Eastern Gate in 574 B.C.
Ezekiel 44:1-3
1 Then the man brought me back to the outer gate of the sanctuary, the one facing east, and it was shut. 2 The LORD said to me, "This gate is to remain shut. It must not be opened; no one may enter through it. It is to remain shut because the LORD, the God of Israel, has entered through it. 3 The prince himself is the only one who may sit inside the gateway to eat in the presence of the LORD. He is to enter by way of the portico of the gateway and go out the same way."
This Eastern gate served a purpose. Jesus Christ entered through this gate, fulfilling an Old Testament prophecy, but later the gate was sealed. Why? For the arrival of the Prince of Peace.
So how did Satan Influence mankind in trying to prevent prophecy from taking place in this matter? Demolition. Even though the nation of Israel was now in existence and under Jewish sovereignty, the city of Jerusalem was not yet under Jewish control. In 1967 the neighboring nation of Jordan had control of the Eastern part of the city of Jerusalem. Jordan’s King Hussein ordered to have the gate removed in order to provide access to a Hotel he wanted to build along the Western Wall of King Solomon’s Temple Mount. On June 4th, 1967 Jordanian workmen prepared for the demolition of the Eastern Gate. By 8:00am on the morning of June 5th, 1967, the Arab-Israeli war broke out, preventing the demolition of the Gate from taking place and for the first time in 1,897 years (since the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. by Titus and his Roman Generals to June 5th, 1967), the city of Jerusalem was once again placed in the hands of the Jews, fulfilling prophecy, and accelerating the countdown for the end times.
2. Prophecy reminds us that God is in control.
God is Sovereign over the entire world. No matter how progressively evil humanity gets, and how much we destroy, God is in control and will only allow so much. God allows evil and waits for people who are affected by that evil to come to Him to escape it because He is good. One of the reasons people come to Christ is because they are tired of the world the way it is (the status quo), and they seek a significant change from it. Many times God allows evil to advance by simply not intervening, thus allowing mankind to fend for himself. Naturally, when mankind is left to his own devices, he creates consequences and allowing those consequences to fully materialize is just one method of Judgment God uses.
3. Prophecy serves as an instrument for measuring the moral and immoral state of humanity. Everyone has heard the saying, “it is a sign of the times,” or ask “what is the world coming to?” Bible prophecy reveals the final moral state of humanity just before Jesus Christ returns to earth. It shows that there is a final state, a certain culture and immoral environment that will determine a milestone conclusion that will lead to mankind, without God, destroying himself and destroying other people by the depravity of their own hearts. Prophecy is in this form of context, a progressive map that says if people are acting in such a way, then you know that time is severely limited before Christ returns to earth.
2 Timothy 3:1-5a
1But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. 2People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, 4treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— 5having a form of godliness but denying its power….
Romans 1:28-32 picks up on this, and adds to the mix what society will be like when it lets go of God.
28Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. 29They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.
Are any of these traits recognizable in today’s society? Prophecy determines an end-point as to how people will behave in the last days.
4. It serves as a tool to prepare us for the Lord’s return, so that we will be ready when we meet him face to face.
1 Thessalonians 3:12-13
12May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you. 13May he strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones.
1 Thessalonians 5:23
23May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
5. When we meet him, we will be relieved to know that all of what we strived to do in his name was worth it. All of the awkward moments that we’ve had with strangers, all of the arguments we had with our family members, all of the times people hid themselves from our presence so as not to pass judgments on them will not matter anymore. Seeing the Lord face to face will melt all of those old feelings and they will no longer matter to us anymore. What we did do in Jesus’ name will be the only thing that matters at this point in time. Nothing else will matter.
1 Peter 1:6-9
6In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. 7These have come so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. 8Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, 9for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.
When the passage meant that faith perishes even though refined by fire, that means that once you see Christ in his physical presence, faith will perish, as you do not need faith in something that is plainly and physically seen. You will be able to see Jesus Christ in the same way you currently see your friends and loved ones.
The benefits of knowing Bible Prophecy are these….
-The Verification of past Promises provides for a Future Hope.
-It is a call to accept Christ as your savior.
-It provides the Motivation to prepare for His Arrival.
Now, earlier in the presentation, I brought to your attention 5 character traits about the Bible. Once again, here they are.
1. The Bible serves as a source of human history and God’s role in it.
2. The Bible serves as a source for wisdom in living and enduring at the present time.
3. The Bible serves as a comfort for those who put its wisdom into action.
4. The Bible chronicles the nature of the human heart and where it will lead with or without him.
5. The Bible reveals what we perceive at this moment as future events, as God revealed to the prophets in the past, the details and events that will lead humanity to a specific, prophetic conclusion.
In a nutshell, here is what the Bible does, in light of history and prophecy. It reveals a supreme reality. The human heart goes in one direction. It does what it wants to do. The Bible chronicles what happens when humankind does what it wants to do and disregards God. It also chronicles the blessings that happen when humankind regards God and invites the Lord into their hearts. There is a stark contrast between the two and choice is what will lead the future of humanity. It serves as testament that God is real and that His will, will for sure come to pass. God’s Kingdom will come to pass. The question is will you be a part of it? Being a part of it means that you become willing to let go of the character traits in your life that are offensive to God, accept Christ as your Lord and Savior, and try to the best of your ability to follow Him. God’s interaction with mankind has served as an unmistakable testament to His Glory, and has at least in my experience, verified his presence in my heart. The scriptures are available to you. It’s up to you whether you choose Christ based on its reality, or reject Christ based on you denying their credibility. Whatever you decide to do, prophecy will complete itself, and you can be on either side of it, but in the end, God’s will, will prevail.
Bible Prophecy--The Importance of Knowing Bible Prophecy Pt.1
www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTckTgSlEvw&feature=channel
Bible Prophecy--The Importance of Knowing Bible Prophecy Pt.2
www.youtube.com/watch?v=EONJFXQnDoE
Bible Prophecy--The Importance of Knowing Bible Prophecy Pt.3
www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkWMdWn9h-o
Otherwise, please enjoy the following presentation in written article form. Thank you.
A Little Information About the Bible:
Some dismiss the Bible as “just a book,” or write it off as some “control mechanism” to dictate their lives. Those views are unstable in scope and dimension, misleading, and dangerous. To a Christian, the Bible is much more. The Bible is a living and breathing entity. When you accept Christ as your savior, and you read the scriptures, the Holy Spirit serves as a “decoder” of some of the more “complicated” elements within the Bible. The Bible serves many functions.
1. The Bible serves as a source of human history and God’s role in it.
2. The Bible serves as a source for wisdom in living and enduring at the present time.
3. The Bible serves as a comfort for those who put its wisdom into action.
4. The Bible chronicles the nature of the human heart and where it will lead with or without him.
5. The Bible reveals what we perceive at this moment as future events, as God revealed to the prophets in the past, the details and events that will lead humanity to a specific, prophetic conclusion.
All that I stated in describing the Bible serves as critical components relating to prophecy, as I will describe for you in a little while. But first, I want to share with you some of the functions of Bible prophecy, and how it relates to human history and where it will lead us in its advancement. Prophecy is a fascinating, compelling, and ever-so interesting field of study. It is history written in advance. When you get into it, and I mean really into it, you can see God’s will for the world and see his plan unfold in it. Understanding Bible Prophecy serves these functions.
1. It proves the validity of the promises of God.
2. It reminds us that God is in control.
3. It serves as an instrument for measuring the moral and immoral state of humanity.
4. It serves as a tool to prepare us for the Lord’s return, so that we will be ready both spiritually and morally when we meet him face to face.
5. We will reach a point when we all know that all we did after receiving Christ as our savior, telling others, and bringing up the hope that was in us was worth it.
I am going to go into detail here a little bit.
1. It proves the validity of the promises of God.
When God makes a promise, he does not take light of it.
As Moses experienced firsthand in Numbers 23:19
19 God is not a man, that he should lie,
nor a son of man, that he should change his mind.
Does he speak and then not act?
Does he promise and not fulfill?
Adding to that, Hebrews 6:13-19a declares the certainty of God’s promise.
13When God made his promise to Abraham, since there was no one greater for him to swear by, he swore by himself, 14saying, "I will surely bless you and give you many descendants." (First given in Genesis 22:17) 15And so after waiting patiently, Abraham received what was promised.
16Men swear by someone greater than themselves, and the oath confirms what is said and puts an end to all argument. 17Because God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose very clear to the heirs of what was promised, he confirmed it with an oath. 18God did this so that, by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope offered to us may be greatly encouraged. 19We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure…..
The Promises God makes are yet just another proof that God exists. If his promises are coming to pass against all odds, and are firm and secure enough to where humanity cannot derail them, then there is an uncommon, supernatural weight behind the one who promises such things, whether visible or invisible. In other words, if humankind cannot prevent a promise of God from taking place, then who is he to say that there is no God altogether? They are stumped and stopped by someone who they claim does not exist.
Throughout the Old Testament, God made a series of promises. He promised the world a King that would rule justly, heal their land, remove their tears and sicknesses, and look out for them. In that, he sent His son, Jesus Christ.
How Satan Influenced Mankind to Try and Prevent prophecy from Taking Place:
King Herod was a Jew who knew prophetic scripture. Paranoid against losing his power as King, the Jews were waiting for the arrival of their Messiah to come in their lifetimes. King Herod found out that the Messiah would arrive as a child, so he ordered that all of the children under the age of 2 be destroyed. Jesus, as a baby was not destroyed. His family fled to Egypt where Jesus was secured and kept safe.
God promised that when Israel came back into Jewish Hands, the nation would never again be destroyed.
Amos 9:14-15 declares….
14 I will bring back my exiled people Israel;
they will rebuild the ruined cities and live in them.
They will plant vineyards and drink their wine;
they will make gardens and eat their fruit.
15 I will plant Israel in their own land,
never again to be uprooted
from the land I have given them,"
says the LORD your God.
The Jews lost their sovereignty over Jerusalem in 586 B.C. to the hands of the Babylonians. Since then, for 2,534 years Israel was not a nation. Not only was it not a nation, but wherever nation the Jews went, they were either in exile, expelled, or destroyed altogether.
How did Satan Influence mankind in trying to prevent prophecy from taking place in this matter?
Jews were the targets of many persecutions for centuries. It was not until May of 1948, just 3 short years after the holocaust, Jews all over the globe began supernaturally returning to Israel, and they established a state, fulfilling the prophecy I just stated from Amos chapter 9. The Bible mentions that in the last days, Israel would be a burdensome stone (Zechariah12:3-KJV) -meaning that it will be an inconvenience, an annoyance, and that people will rather it fall off the face of the earth than deal with it, but those who try to remove it will end up hurting themselves in the process. Many nations on earth today want Israel destroyed. They believe that it is in the way of establishing world peace and global government. Irregardless of the powerful threats against it, the nation of Israel will be protected supernaturally by God. At this moment, the momentum is coming together that makes the fulfillment of Ezekiel chapters 38 and 39, which chronicles the invasion of Israel by nations like Russia to come into fulfillment. But regardless of this fact, God will prevail, as he states that in the process of this invasion….
Ezekiel 28:21-23
22 I will execute judgment upon him with plague and bloodshed; I will pour down torrents of rain, hailstones and burning sulfur on him and on his troops and on the many nations with him. 23 And so I will show my greatness and my holiness, and I will make myself known in the sight of many nations. Then they will know that I am the LORD.'
The nation of Israel’s existence within this very age was birthed by a promise, and protected by a promise. As long as the nation of Israel exists, God once again proves to the world that he exists, and that His will, will prevail.
Another promise in the Bible that man could not derail is the promise of the entrance of Jesus Christ at the Eastern Gate in Jerusalem at His Second Coming.
Ezekiel 43:1, 2, & 4
1 Then the man brought me to the gate facing east, 2 and I saw the glory of the God of Israel coming from the east. His voice was like the roar of rushing waters, and the land was radiant with his glory. 4 The glory of the LORD entered the temple through the gate facing east.
This promise was delivered to the prophet Ezekiel in 574 B.C. just 12 years after the Babylonians invaded Jerusalem. Jesus went through that gate in 33 A.D. on Palm Sunday as people shouted, “"Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!" "Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!" (Luke 19:38) The Jews rejected Jesus as their Messiah, but there was more written that pertained to the Eastern Gate in 574 B.C.
Ezekiel 44:1-3
1 Then the man brought me back to the outer gate of the sanctuary, the one facing east, and it was shut. 2 The LORD said to me, "This gate is to remain shut. It must not be opened; no one may enter through it. It is to remain shut because the LORD, the God of Israel, has entered through it. 3 The prince himself is the only one who may sit inside the gateway to eat in the presence of the LORD. He is to enter by way of the portico of the gateway and go out the same way."
This Eastern gate served a purpose. Jesus Christ entered through this gate, fulfilling an Old Testament prophecy, but later the gate was sealed. Why? For the arrival of the Prince of Peace.
So how did Satan Influence mankind in trying to prevent prophecy from taking place in this matter? Demolition. Even though the nation of Israel was now in existence and under Jewish sovereignty, the city of Jerusalem was not yet under Jewish control. In 1967 the neighboring nation of Jordan had control of the Eastern part of the city of Jerusalem. Jordan’s King Hussein ordered to have the gate removed in order to provide access to a Hotel he wanted to build along the Western Wall of King Solomon’s Temple Mount. On June 4th, 1967 Jordanian workmen prepared for the demolition of the Eastern Gate. By 8:00am on the morning of June 5th, 1967, the Arab-Israeli war broke out, preventing the demolition of the Gate from taking place and for the first time in 1,897 years (since the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. by Titus and his Roman Generals to June 5th, 1967), the city of Jerusalem was once again placed in the hands of the Jews, fulfilling prophecy, and accelerating the countdown for the end times.
2. Prophecy reminds us that God is in control.
God is Sovereign over the entire world. No matter how progressively evil humanity gets, and how much we destroy, God is in control and will only allow so much. God allows evil and waits for people who are affected by that evil to come to Him to escape it because He is good. One of the reasons people come to Christ is because they are tired of the world the way it is (the status quo), and they seek a significant change from it. Many times God allows evil to advance by simply not intervening, thus allowing mankind to fend for himself. Naturally, when mankind is left to his own devices, he creates consequences and allowing those consequences to fully materialize is just one method of Judgment God uses.
3. Prophecy serves as an instrument for measuring the moral and immoral state of humanity. Everyone has heard the saying, “it is a sign of the times,” or ask “what is the world coming to?” Bible prophecy reveals the final moral state of humanity just before Jesus Christ returns to earth. It shows that there is a final state, a certain culture and immoral environment that will determine a milestone conclusion that will lead to mankind, without God, destroying himself and destroying other people by the depravity of their own hearts. Prophecy is in this form of context, a progressive map that says if people are acting in such a way, then you know that time is severely limited before Christ returns to earth.
2 Timothy 3:1-5a
1But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. 2People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, 4treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— 5having a form of godliness but denying its power….
Romans 1:28-32 picks up on this, and adds to the mix what society will be like when it lets go of God.
28Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. 29They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.
Are any of these traits recognizable in today’s society? Prophecy determines an end-point as to how people will behave in the last days.
4. It serves as a tool to prepare us for the Lord’s return, so that we will be ready when we meet him face to face.
1 Thessalonians 3:12-13
12May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you. 13May he strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones.
1 Thessalonians 5:23
23May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
5. When we meet him, we will be relieved to know that all of what we strived to do in his name was worth it. All of the awkward moments that we’ve had with strangers, all of the arguments we had with our family members, all of the times people hid themselves from our presence so as not to pass judgments on them will not matter anymore. Seeing the Lord face to face will melt all of those old feelings and they will no longer matter to us anymore. What we did do in Jesus’ name will be the only thing that matters at this point in time. Nothing else will matter.
1 Peter 1:6-9
6In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. 7These have come so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. 8Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, 9for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.
When the passage meant that faith perishes even though refined by fire, that means that once you see Christ in his physical presence, faith will perish, as you do not need faith in something that is plainly and physically seen. You will be able to see Jesus Christ in the same way you currently see your friends and loved ones.
The benefits of knowing Bible Prophecy are these….
-The Verification of past Promises provides for a Future Hope.
-It is a call to accept Christ as your savior.
-It provides the Motivation to prepare for His Arrival.
Now, earlier in the presentation, I brought to your attention 5 character traits about the Bible. Once again, here they are.
1. The Bible serves as a source of human history and God’s role in it.
2. The Bible serves as a source for wisdom in living and enduring at the present time.
3. The Bible serves as a comfort for those who put its wisdom into action.
4. The Bible chronicles the nature of the human heart and where it will lead with or without him.
5. The Bible reveals what we perceive at this moment as future events, as God revealed to the prophets in the past, the details and events that will lead humanity to a specific, prophetic conclusion.
In a nutshell, here is what the Bible does, in light of history and prophecy. It reveals a supreme reality. The human heart goes in one direction. It does what it wants to do. The Bible chronicles what happens when humankind does what it wants to do and disregards God. It also chronicles the blessings that happen when humankind regards God and invites the Lord into their hearts. There is a stark contrast between the two and choice is what will lead the future of humanity. It serves as testament that God is real and that His will, will for sure come to pass. God’s Kingdom will come to pass. The question is will you be a part of it? Being a part of it means that you become willing to let go of the character traits in your life that are offensive to God, accept Christ as your Lord and Savior, and try to the best of your ability to follow Him. God’s interaction with mankind has served as an unmistakable testament to His Glory, and has at least in my experience, verified his presence in my heart. The scriptures are available to you. It’s up to you whether you choose Christ based on its reality, or reject Christ based on you denying their credibility. Whatever you decide to do, prophecy will complete itself, and you can be on either side of it, but in the end, God’s will, will prevail.